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The Psycholinguistics of Words, Sentences and Discourse introduces the way words, sentences and discourse live in the mind. Actual language use is about putting together words into syntactic frames that make sense in a specific context. This book provides an overview of the many mental processes involved in that.
List of contents
Acknowledgments1. Introduction1.1. Going to the moon or translating
1.2. Clearing up three misunderstandings
1.3. What and how
Review questions
Further questions
2. Processing words2.1. Introduction; what's in a word?
2.2. It is big and it moves fast, soooo fast...
23. Accessing the lexicon: three problems
2.4. Dealing with co-articulation
2.5. Activation is not selection
2.6. The words that meant too much
2.7. Selection criteria in access
2.8. The production of small words
2.9. Summarizing
Review questions
Further questions
3. Processing sentences 3.1. Introduction: What is a grammar good for?
3.2. The origin of sentence processing research
3.3. The origin of modern sentence processing research
3.4. The famous case of relative clauses after complex NPs
3.4.1. Introduction: the Garden Path Model
3.4.2. The Tuning model: the role of frequency in syntactic disambiguation
3.4.3. Construal: because not all constituents are created equal
3.4.4. The role of segmentation and prosody
3.4.5. The role of lexical and sentential meaning and context: Satisfying multiple constraints
3.4.6. The Unrestricted Race Model
3.5. The processing of agreement
3.5.1. Introduction
3.5.2. The phenomenon of attraction in production
3.5.3. Agreement in comprehension
3.6. The 'empty categories'
3.6.1. Introduction
3.6.2. PRO and the grammar of control
3.6.3. The Active Filler Strategy: traces
3.6.4. Word order as a guide
3.6.5. Summing up gaps (and, really, everything else ...)
3.7. Heuristics and
good-enough, goal-directed, predictive processing
Review questions
Further questions
4. Processing discourse 4.1. Discourse
4.2. The human inferential capacity
4.3. The memory of discourse
4.4. Referential coherence
4.5. Relational coherence (I)
4.6. Relational coherence (II)
4.7. Schemas and memory: computational economics that come at a price
Review questions
Further questions
5. Epilogue: artificial intelligence and language5.1. Introduction
5.2. Artificial intelligence and human language
5.3. Artificial intelligence and 'sophisticated' syntax
Review questions
Further questions
Index
About the author
Carlos Acuña-Fariña, a linguist and a psycholinguist, is Professor of English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. His psycholinguistic research has used the methodologies of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs). He is the author of
Syntactic Processing: An Overview (2024).
